Link to Audio Clip: https://www.bravevoices.fieldscenter.princeton.edu/princetonians-fight-for-asian-american-studies

Zoom Interview on June 27, 2020

EK: Evan Kratzer (interviewee)

FM: Fumika Mizuno (interviewer)

FM:

It's June 27th at 10:00 AM Pacific and 1:00 PM Eastern I'm Fumika Mizuno interviewing Evan Kratzer.

I was wondering if we could start off with you telling me a little bit about your background and your hometown.

EK:

I'm originally from suburban New York. I'm from Westchester County, a town called Scarsdale which is a rather well-to-do town in the New York city area that is primarily Jewish and has a small Asian minority, which is maybe about 10%. It's probably grown since then when I was growing up, it's about 10% of the community. I am half Japanese, half white. My mom is an immigrant from Tokyo who moved here in 1987.

Growing up, pretty much I was part of this like smaller minority in town. It was something that I think made it so I never felt totally out of place, but at the same time, it wasn't like there was a community of people like me, particularly because that community was also primarily Chinese and Korean. There were a couple of Japanese people, not that many.

FM:

Could you tell me a little bit about your high school experience? Did you attend high school in the town that you grew up?

EK:

Yeah. So I went to Scarsdale High School and I attended school there. I don't know, high school was good. I generally enjoyed it. My understanding of being Asian American was a very gradual process that played out as I was growing up. My parents divorced when I was six and so I was kind of bouncing between like a Japanese household and like a white household for awhile, pretty much continuously even to today.

That kind of dynamic made it so I became more acutely aware of that kind of cultural difference growing up. Initially it was more of a generalized understanding of like, this is kind of what it means to be Japanese, this is kind of what it means to be like truly American -- white American.

Then, when I was in high school, because I became friends or I grew up, my group of friends was more expanded in a way that included a good number of people from other backgrounds and kind of grappling with, how do I think about being Japanese as opposed to being Chinese or Korean, and how does that really relate or are there similarities or differences? I think that's something we just kind of played around with then, you know, as kids to kind of joke about it and try to figure out identity formation.

But for me, the most notable and relevant part, probably of my high school experience was, in my junior year. I was thinking of something I could read over the summer and I found this book list of possible things to read. This book that really struck my interest was a book called Asian American Dreams by Helen Zia. And that was on that list. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. Maybe I'll just read that.

So I read that and that totally changed my understanding of my own identity and my place within the United States. And so that was kind of my inlet into Asian American Studies and what you could get out of learning about the history of Asian Americans in the United States and the kind of social implications for traditional American understandings of white-black race if you add Asians into the mix.

I don't know if that directly answers your question, but that's generally what my high school experience was like.

FM:

Already in high school you were forming that Asian-American panethnic consciousness.

EK:

When I was applying to college, I was really looking at, or I was trying to figure out how I could explore this a little bit more. I think when I was selecting colleges, it wasn't like that was my sole focus, but that was certainly something I want to incorporate into my undergrad, into my college experience.

When I was looking at Princeton and one of the things that I noticed was, does Princeton have Asian American studies? I didn't really find much. And I got an understanding that if you weren't on the West coast, you wouldn't find that much generally. But I saw that AASA had an Asian American Studies committee. I was like, oh, that's great. I'm going to find them and join that when I get to campus. So I had some intention of doing that.

FM:

Tell me about arriving at Princeton. What was the transition like?

EK:

I'm a legacy of Princeton. I was kind of familiar with the university. I had like been to reunions a bunch and so for me it was, yeah, like my dad and my stepmom got married at the Princeton Chapel. Right. It was kind of a thing where actually, it wasn't my first choice to go there because I thought I’d be too caught up in my family and I kind of wanted to get away from that, but that's where I ended up and I'm very happy that I went.

The transition as a result was kind of weird for me where it's not like the same... Probably a lot of people arrive at a place like Princeton and go, wow, there's all this beautiful stuff around me and this is so brand new. And for me, it's just like, okay, I've been here before.

I've never seen this building before because I was in Forbes and no one ever goes to Forbes, unless you have reason to go there. But it's like, okay, I moved in and yeah, the transition in that sense was not very difficult or weird for me, but at the same, I ended up in substance free housing when I first got to campus.

I don't know if that's true still, but at least when I --I mean, we're not that different in age, so presumably still the same -- but when I moved in, substance free housing was by and large majority Asian, just because of, I guess, how different people decide to select it. But my zee group was like two thirds Asian, and I got a core group of friends out of that, not because that's related, but just I think that formed another basis for similarity and shared interests.

It kind of ran from there. Those people stayed to be my good friend since then. And I found AASA pretty soon thereafter because I think the activities fair was a week or two after we moved in.

FM:

Could you tell me about your involvement? And also, I know from very early on, you were a part of the committee and then stayed with that for all four years and were very active.

EK:

I'm trying to remember exactly how I ended up there. I probably went to the AASA booth at the activities fair and then just signed up. But I remember that I specifically wanted to do the Asian American Studies committee. I was looking into just what their first meeting was, and it was in some common room, I think in the basement of 1915 or something in Wilson.

Then I got there and it was very small. Like the committee was with Linda and then Charles Du and Tara Ohrtman, who are both class of 2013 and who had started the most recent iteration of the Asian American Studies committee but as seniors, I think that they were starting to get into thesis mode.

In practice, the week to week meetings were often right at the beginning, just Linda and me and working on that, which was great. I had a lot of fun with Linda, but it was very much like, okay, how were the two of us going to be able to get something to happen?

When I was there, and up until more recently, my understanding is that AASA had a social division between those who are more politically oriented and those who were more socially oriented. And I was in the more politically oriented side, doing that and going to meetings, but the core focus being the smaller Asian American Studies committee meetings that Linda and I started to have weekly.

Pretty soon thereafter, we met with Professor Cheng. I honestly actually can't remember the first time. I was also at the same time in a class in the fall. So this is 2012. That was an Asian American literature and law class co-taught by Professor Cheng and Denny Chin from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. That was also an opportunity to learn a lot more about Asian American Studies as I'm starting to work on it as well. The result is that from that, I met some of the other people who were very supportive of being architects and really helped us along.

So there were other AASA co-presidents who are, I think there's a whole bunch of us who ended up being in that class over the course of those 2013, 2016. And getting to know Professor Cheng, who of course would be the driving force behind all of this, and we're helping her along.

That was the initial experience that I had.

FM:

That class sounds really interesting. What were the weekly meetings like, logistically? What were you planning? What were you doing week to week?

EK:

I think a bunch of what we were initially doing was pushing forward the ideas that Tara and Charles had come up with. I think their initial thought was, well before we can really do anything, we need to have a good sense of interest that exists in the community and to start telling people about this because Asian American Studies is rather under the radar at Princeton.

The very first bigger thing that we were trying to do was, we were trying to make surveys that we could send out to gauge interest in Asian American studies classes and Asian American studies programming as a whole. The Asian American literature and law class was a seminar, so it's on the smaller side, but it was totally over-enrolled. It got to like 30 people, if I remember correctly. It was clear that there was some interest, but we wanted to know how much there was. We started by sending out surveys to a college listservs and eating club listservs, and then we also created a secondary one for alumni and we were contacting A4P so we can send it out to Asian alumni.

If you were to ask someone who actually does survey methods if this was well done, they would clearly say, no, this is like terrible, you know, like questions were not put in or were not constructed in a very unbiased way. There was not a randomized survey sample-- all this kind of stuff. When I was later at Princeton, and actually had taken classes on survey methods, I was like, oh, we did a really kind of bad job in terms of constructing this.

But, we were able to at least have something that we could look at, at the end and say, okay, there's at least enough people who are interested enough to be able to answer this kind of survey question and register a support in some way and that also brings us some people who might have concerns and you can start thinking. What are the concerns that people might have that are sufficiently motivating them, that they're willing to answer a survey and respond to it?

The goal from that was to get to what we wrote in March of 2013, which was a report on Asian American studies and getting that to the university, because I think in our understanding in talking with Professor Cheng and just generally, was that pretty much the key messages I think we got from Professor Cheng -- and that has been a driving force of a lot of what we did -- was that if you're actually going to make an Asian American Studies program or any kind of program that's sustainable, you want to make sure that you have the resources.

The name, it's not really that important.If you have something that's called an Asian American Studies program, but then it doesn't have the resources to do funding or to do research or doesn't have that many faculty members who are a part of it, doesn't have the ability to really put on programming, then it's kind of a hollow victory.

And so, the goal behind this overall was to try to make it so that you could get a commitment to do concrete steps to build out a program. In order to do that, you can't just kind of like petition a university and say, we really want this and to hold like a protest, because we know that also the students had tried doing that in the past, in the 1990s and had gotten some success, but it was not long term because I believe they hired a faculty member in Asian American history and then the faculty member left after a couple of years and there wasn't much of a lasting impact.

We were thinking about how we can convince the university, really put money behind a PR initiative. And that way to do that was to work with administrators and to figure out what is going to be the argument that convinces them, that this is a thing that is worth supporting as necessary to meet Princeton's overall goals of being a preeminent liberal arts school that's trying to meet the academic and social and political needs and waves of the 21st century.

The result was we'd go with a very academic way of writing a report and putting it together which is very different than a lot of what a lot of other people who might be campus activists might do. But that's what we were going towards and saying, here's how we can talk about the history of what's happened at the university. We can talk about what student interest is, we can talk about alumni interest, and we can also start talking about what really are the more concrete steps that would need to happen for this kind of program to actually get off the ground.

This was successful in terms of getting it on the radar for people I think, both in the sense that we were able to get some people talking about in the Prince. It was enough that we could meet with then provost Eisgruber and talk to him about it.

It's not the President but at the same time, since Shirley Tilghman was about to step down, it was actually even more relevant in many ways, and that was pretty good. I'm just going on and on, so I'll stop my answer in a moment. But just to say that there's, I think in any academic setting, there's what the students can see because of they're there talking with faculty, but then all of the administrative decisions are going to end up being made on the back end at some level.

And at any university also, because of the nature of tenure and the structure of funding, the power is very much held in departments, at least at Princeton. The departments are, it's kind of individual fiefdoms that have to be brought along if we're going to actually be able to make any progress. Luckily, the history department was really willing to play the game and was really willing to support this.

They really saw that history is one of the core areas of Asian American studies that has been most built out, that people see a lot of value in, and is one that the university had clearly a shortage. They were willing, the history department, through the help of or the encouragement of Professor Cheng and Dirk Hartog, who I think is now emeritus, but at the time was head of the program in American Studies and was a very strong supporter of Asian American Studies throughout his time heading it, convinced the history department to start a search for an Asian American historian, which resulted in Professor Lew-Williams eventually being hired.

What we were doing was, we were trying to just get people talking about it a little bit, get them to be on the radar so that there is more urgency and more of a push that can make it so what's happening on the back end, moves forward. And if people like Professor Cheng or other people who are advocating for Asian American Studies are trying to convince their colleagues about the need for it, they won't just hit a dead end. We understand that this is something that people talk about other schools, but that isn't Princeton's thing or something like that.

FM:

It seems like a very from-the-inside-of-the-system type of way, understanding all the bureaucracy and how the administration works. Did you feel like you were really familiar with how the cogs of Princeton decision making works after that, having to do all that research?

EK:

By the end of my time at Princeton, certainly, I think that. You know, as a freshman, how much did I fully appreciate? By the time we were onboarding new people for Asian American Studies, like when I was a junior, when I was a senior, there's this whole kind of course, in a sense that you have to teach people in terms of: how does the university actually function so that if you want to get something to happen, if you want to get something off the ground, where can you go?

Because the thing about Asian American Studies is that there was pretty much no one, and so the issue is you don't have that many people who are already within the system who will push forward and will be in, who just need to expand their territory. You have to make the territory in the first place. That really requires that you be able to understand who are the key decision makers who are going to be able to bring in the people who will do this in particular, because Asian American Studies is so interdisciplinary that it wasn't going to emerge as like a department or anything like that. You're not going to make it so it's a primary home for faculty. Their primary home is going to be some other department. That really required knowing, what are the different opinions of the different departments, who is more willing to play ball with you? And how do they relate to the faculties or to the overall administration? How much do you need the buy-in of the provost versus the Dean of the faculty and all of that, to be able to get the necessary sign-offs for faculty searches to be going forward?

FM:

I'm also wondering how your work changed from when you were a freshman all the way to a senior. How did your attitude towards the work change and also your leadership role. By the end you were teaching the incoming classes about the committee?

EK:

I think that the biggest change was that there were more of us. We're not putting some scrappy report together that doesn't really think too much about actually, how you might want to accurately construct a survey or something like that.

You have more people. The other thing is that kind of continuity was so essential because we did not know how long this would take. I didn't expect anything to happen, for any kind of final result to happen when I was at the university. Any person who looks at student activism systemically would notice that oftentimes, students are fighting a fundamental problem, which is that they're time limited. No one's there for that long and so once they graduate, if certain people who have the enthusiasm and energy to do it graduate, right?

So like Tara and Charles were very committed to building Asian American Studies, but after 2013, they were gone. Then, the initiative will die. You need to make sure you are constantly bringing in new people to help push it along. We felt that being able to build out the Asian American Studies committee and make it like an institutionalized part of AASA that was working on that and also making other institutions that would keep it alive on campus, such as Unfound, the journal of Asian American studies on campus. We created that for two main reasons. One was that we thought that it would be a good way to highlight to faculty that student interest exists at different schools, what students would be able to achieve through their research or what they'd be able to put together and the academic value of that research, but also provide a new outlet for students who want to get involved with Asian American studies because if you're on campus, there was maybe one or two courses a year. You weren't going to be able to really fully satiate your appetite for Asian American studies through just those courses.

That's another way that you could get exposure if you wanted and would bring people in to constantly be thinking about this and keep going. And that was actually part of how we got Emily Tu, who was a classmate of mine in the class of 2016, and also working with us.

Then she became a core member of Asian American studies committee and really helping me throughout the process. There are all of these different ways to get people involved and to really build out what it is so. My personal role, I think, was one where I was trying to build it out.

Of course, it's working together with everyone, but you don't want any one person to be the core of it or anything like that. And so, trying to improve or raise these other people to join the committee, which was great because then when we were getting towards the end of my time at Princeton. Then the movement was not focused as much on getting some faculty involved or putting out the idea that different parts of universities should consider hiring faculty because people have been talked to. We had met with the chair of the politics department and Nolan McCarty. We had met with people at other departments and tried to say, would you consider expanding into Asian American studies? What do you see as your ideological reservations about how this fits in with how you envision your department as working. Princeton as a particularly theoretical school in many ways makes it so that's something that's a bit more applied for social sciences-- social sciences has always been the harder nut to crack in many ways.

I think that's in part because ethnic studies can feel a bit more applied where you're taking general theories about how politics works or how social science research is done and applying it to a particular ethnic group or how that fits into the American story. Combating that narrative was something we would have to think about.

That kind of push was then reduced and what we instead had to be thinking about was okay, now that we have some people, right. We knew that Professor Cheng was there. Professor Lew-Williams was there. Paul Nadal was there. We needed to then start thinking beyond that. And Professor Cheng started this Asian American studies speakers program through the program in American studies, but how do we start building this out so that's not only just, you have some resources, but there is some place that they can live, or someplace where this intellectual discourse can happen that will really build out the way that people think about Asian American Studies and can really provide a home for people who are interested in this. Professor Cheng's idea to make the program in American Studies upgraded to level two, which is the Center for American Studies, was the focus.

Our 2015 report, I don't know if the number of people on the 2015 report is larger than the number of people in 2013, but in practice, the number of people working on it was substantially larger. You could start thinking about, okay, how do we want to structure this? How can we do research on what other universities are doing, thinking about what has worked and what has not, and providing different options for the university to be able to really build this out and get it moving so that we can make a good strong program.

The focus of what we were working on was changing and the people who we had was increasing in number, and we had more resources and opportunities at our disposal to get people involved. We felt like we were building momentum to be able to keep going so that we can take this push wherever it needs to go in order to keep expanding this in future years.

FM:

I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the Unbound journal, how that idea came about, who else was involved, how you got submissions.

EK:

When we were creating Unfound, I don't remember exactly how we thought of the idea. I think part of it was that I had been involved in other journals on campus. I eventually became one of the people leading the Journal of East Asian Studies on campus.

And so I thought the idea that you might have an undergraduate journal didn't seem weird, or it was at least an idea that was out there. But I think that, it's just, you know, we want to be able to do more, we want to be able to learn more. And there's not that many resources here. What else can we do? And so we created it and it was pretty much the same, the initial editorial board of Unfounded, the Journal of Asian American studies, just overlapped with the committee for Asian American Studies. I don't know what they've done with it as of now, but it was at least formally within AASA at the time. It didn't have like a separate student account with ODUS or anything. Andrew, who became the committee chair, the Asian American American Studies committee chair after I did, was the other co-editor in chief with me. And we were looking at it for really just high quality research.

I think we got something like 13 submissions in our first year, of which we chose five. We were trying to make it so that there were a variety of different areas represented. We were trying to make it so that it really could stand on its own as something we could give to people to demonstrate like, look, this is the kind of student research that you get at other schools. Imagine if Princeton students were doing this, this could be great, right? You need more outlets for people to do that. I don't know how much into the nitty gritty of how we exactly evaluated these you want to go, but I think that that was the general goal that we had. We wanted to make sure that it was something that looked good, so we were making sure that we paid attention to the formatting, good design, all this kind of stuff.

We went endlessly about the name. It took us forever to think of it. And it was something that we then printed a whole bunch of copies of so that we could give it to people as part of that whole awareness raising and as an example of what Princeton is missing out on.

We also distributed copies to President Eisgruber and Provost Lee and the Dean of the faculty to get the college, et cetera, and to all of the different departments. We were trying to convince the higher people so that they could see there is something there that goes on at other universities that they're missing out on.

That was kind of how that went forward. We were able to get a good number of submissions from a bunch of different places, including the UK. So we were pretty happy about that as well. I think the main problems with convincing the university always was that, in many ways, Princeton is small c conservative in the sense that the university cares a lot about making sure that it has very, you know. It's like this small group, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton that are at the top and you have to compete with your peers and make sure that you aren't doing anything that's going to be out of line with your brand.

So part of it was always trying to convince the university, not to just look to quote unquote peer institutions, but to say, here is a place where Princeton could lead and really try to push this forward because other schools are missing out on something pretty incredible. And we can be the ones who are pushing the way forward and give this area that really has legitimacy everywhere else that extra boost of recognition that comes with the Princeton name that could be really beneficial. So it was good for that reason as well, to be able to help legitimize the field.

FM:

I'm wondering if working on all of this throughout your four years, how did it affect how you viewed your own identity as well? Were you more conscious about your own identity, learning so much about the history?

EK:

I mean, I think so. I think that it helped me to gain a much greater appreciation of the community that I see that I'm a part of or that exists out there. I'm not sure what your perspective is on this as someone from the West coast. But my understanding has always been that West coast and East coast Asians think a little bit differently, just because of the different percentages of people who are around and the historical communities that exist.

If you're a Japanese American in New York City, there's not a real clear historical community that you are a part of. There are some people who have been Japanese who have been in New York for a while, but it's not any of the same kind of institutionalization that exists on the West coast in many cases.

I think for me, seeing that was very useful in terms of helping me to appreciate, it's not just the story of taking an artificial category at some level Asians, which is so broad and kind of just superimposing that is like a filter through which you view American history, but then seeing how there actually are so many commonalities about how Asians in the United States experience race. Ultimately, even if cultural backgrounds or perspectives or what people care

about might be different, ultimately, how you are perceived as being Asian in the United States is so important and fundamental that you can't just ignore the aspect of race and how that does help to actually in many ways make Asians Americans have many things in common. Because if you look at examples like Vincent Chin's killing and in Detroit, you know, it's just an example of how, to many people, Chinese, Japanese, Korean people, other Asian ethnic groups, South Asians could just be interchangeable. The experiences they have, they feel are the same.

And so from that perspective, I thought, well, this truly makes sense if I'm trying to think of my identity as being in some ways just tied to my lived experience in the United States, that's clearly the one that is most important. And then particularly, I think it kind of went together with how I had grown up speaking Japanese, so learned that at Princeton. Then I went to do Princeton in Ishikawa and spent a summer in Japan. And then I came to appreciate, there's such a homogeneity in Japan and I like a very set way of fitting in that, even though I don't feel as if I'm like radically different from anyone else, it's not like, the experience of a person in Japan is so different or so similar to what my personal experiences.

And so Asian-American, even more so than Japanese American in some ways, was more of a phrase and a term that accurately reflected what my personal experience in life was like. So I think that the process of learning about Asian American Studies helped to make it so that I really landed on that as my personal understanding of myself, and one that I feel that I think everyone, at some point in their, usually in college or high school, kind of goes through this experience, where they’re trying to figure out who they are. And for me it's like that solidified that and has made it so I feel very comfortable in that respect.

FM:

What you said about Japanese identity and not feeling very Japanese, I feel that. I was born in Japan, but I grew up in the States and I'm very non Japanese. So I definitely feel more Asian American.

EK:

It's interesting in Japan just because, I think for me, part of it being that I, as someone who's only half ethnically Japanese as opposed to full, already does a lot. I think that in more recent years, Japan has become more accepting of people who are a little bit more ethnically diverse, but that's still far from the norm. The expectation of how the individual person is supposed to behave is pretty set. My mom left Japan because she felt very constrained in many ways by the gender norms that existed there and how she thought that she was just destined to become a housewife who didn't have a career and was set doing what was preordained for her. I think maybe that also probably reflects, or affects me in my personal understanding of Japan, but it's very different from the United States in that respect or even other Asian countries, honestly.

FM:

I was going to ask, do you remember when you first heard that Asian American Studies was going to become a certificate?

EK:

We were thrilled. I mean, I knew it was in the works right before I graduated. We were really happy that that was finally solidified and in our mind, one of the other big goals was to get it as a separate course heading in the course catalog, which feels very bureaucratic if you hear it described in that way, but I think to many students, or for us as students it felt kind of important. Particularly because Asian American studies AAS is, or not AAS because it's ASA because AAS was taken by African American studies, but starting with A puts it towards the top of the listing so people actually can see it and know it exists as a thing. They don't have to look around on the web in order to figure out that that's actually an area. It's something where they're just trying to explore courses, figure out what they want to take, it's there.

I wish I could have gotten a certificate in Asian American studies when I was on campus and that wasn't a thing. I guess it's still technically a certificate. I don't know, actually, if it comes up when you receive your certificate, as Asian American Studies or American Studies with a concentration in Asian American Studies.

FM:

It's a separate certificate pretty entirely.

EK:

Oh great, even better. I really wish that that was the case when I was on campus, so I'm glad that students from now on are going to be able to have that opportunity because it's, I don't know, it's a satisfying accomplishment or like a capstone in that way to what we've been working on, though, of course we hope to be able to build it up more in the future.

FM:

I don't know what your focus was in law school, but I'm wondering how all of your work with this committee and with the certificate studies movement has affected your post grad life.

EK:

In many ways I think that my understanding of myself as being Asian American helped me to broaden my interests in many ways. So when I got into campus, I thought I would do stuff on Asian American Studies and I would look at Japanese international relations because I generally thought international relations was quite interesting.

But then, through a combination of my own lack of, or the fact that my focus on Japan specifically kind of went away a little bit, and my understanding of international relations really made it so you can't just focus on Japan, you have to look at the region, made it so that I started learning Chinese.

I did a Princeton Asia fellowship in China for a year because I thought that rounding out my understanding of East Asia and the different forces in the area would be really personally fulfilling and useful. That did a lot, and I think for me, in many ways, what I came to appreciate was that, well, I initially was thinking I might become an academic after graduation and I was considering doing a PhD, but then I realized I'm too risk averse to be able to go on the academic job market.

I instead went to law school because I realized also in the process of doing all of this, that for me personally, part of what motivated me and kept me doing it was that I just really enjoyed having a system that you have, that you want to try to get something done with it, and you try to figure out how you can do that, which is effectively what we were doing was right? We're trying to figure out, okay, Princeton is this kind of system. There are these choke points and these places where we need to get approval that exists. And so how can we push this force that we build something that's sustainable and that will keep going into the future and is not just a hollow certificate or something. You can actually take some classes.

I felt well, if I want to do something like that, and I'm interested in these social issues in policy, law is the way to go about that because my goal is to be able to work in the government in some capacity in the future. Because law is a form of policy, that's really just applied, how do you get any policy in practice? You have to enact laws, you have to enact regulations that will make that happen. And law gives you the authority to be able to understand what the structures of government are that really make it so that you can push whatever you think is the appropriate thing that needs to happen forward, then that seemed like the logical way for me to decide where to go forward. And so that's how I ended up where I am now.

Unfortunately, stuff on Asian American Studies is not really a thing in law as a field. There's not like an Asian American sub category. To some extent that makes sense. The way that law works is that it's better to understand the issues that affect Asian Americans as subcategories of equal protection law or immigration law, or these bodies that affect more groups of people and that affect Asian Americans in particular ways. Critical race theory helps to cut across it.

But the end result is that, I think that's helped me in particularly this current moment when we see Black Lives Matter having this resurgence in popularity and people focusing on issues of police brutality. It helps me appreciate, okay, so we know that there are many systemic problems that exist in policing that make us so that it causes all of this death and pain for communities of color. If we're trying to think about how we actually are going to change it, you can have a slogan, like police abolition or something, which really can get at the general push.

But if you're going to make it so that you have the actual levers in place to enforce change, you need to think about these legal issues, like qualified immunity or other things that really help to make it so the legal system as a whole promotes and protects this kind of system.

My work on Asian American studies has helped me think about how that really is something people need to think about. It's important to know about if you want to see how change really can be implemented in practice. I think that it's changed my outlook of what I hope to do going forward for that reason as well.

FM:

The recent Black Lives Matter reminded me just how important Asian American studies is, because without that, a lot of Asians don't really have the vocabulary to talk about their identity and talk about where they are in relation to black and white, that kind of binary. I’m wondering how recent events have made you think about your work or think about ethnic studies?

EK:

I think that the issues that are currently being explored are ones that in many ways, highlight the need for ethnic studies to keep existing and to keep expanding. In so many ways, the current moment is important because it's conscious raising. It’s something that is making people, particularly because coronavirus has put the world on pause in so many ways and has given people time. It has made it so people use this time to keep reflecting on how they personally might have opinions or might have implicit views that support and perpetuate unequal and racist systems that currently exist in our society.

A lot of discussions and conversations around race are really toxic in so many ways in the United States because it's such a sensitive topic and it's something that many people can feel, not only might racist views be articulated or hurtful and highly damaging views perpetuated, but it's also something where if you are actually thinking about making positive change, making it so that we can minimize implicit bias or people can reconsider views that are perpetuating these systems. You need to make it so that they can override and can think back and reflect and change views which might be hard wired into their ways of thinking.

Race, because of how it can be so personal, it can make it so that people feel alienated and don’t want to engage in these conversations. So having an academic setting to talk about it, so like Asian American studies or other kinds of ethnic studies classes, I hope, and I think have done correctly and well, can make it so that more people feel open to engaging in these conversations, make it so that they have a context that is not as personal, that's more reflective and really helping not only to understand the perspectives of people or helping people who are not, for example, Black understand the perspectives of people who are Black, not Asian understand the perspective of people who are Asian, and help them expand their understandings and make it so that they can really see the inequities that exist and have their opinions change in a way that doesn't require calling someone a racist in a way that makes shut down and instinctively become defensive as a form of white fragility, or it could be Asian fragility or any other kind of natural flex response, but one that can push that dialogue forward productively.

I think that all of the protests made me think about how in many ways, the general goal of raising consciousness has to happen in many different forms. You need to be able to reach people who are not in a university context through protests or through public conversation, public dialogue.

But ethnic studies is, in many ways, it can be so critical because it comes up at a formative time in people's lives when they're in high school, when they're in college and they're really trying to explore their understanding of the world and get an understanding of what the world is that they're going to enter once they graduate.

It can help to provide the kind of progressive thinking that I think is necessary to push forward demonstrations like these.

FM:

That was going to be my last question, just the importance of ethnic studies. I think you really touched on that. I don't want to take too much of your time, but it was really enjoyable hearing you speak. I'm wondering if there's anything that you can think of that you'd like to say that I didn't ask you related to all the things that we talked about?

EK:

I think I can't underscore just how much Professor Cheng is central to all of this. Whenever I've talked to someone about this, I try to end on that note just because I think if you were to look back in the archives or something like that at the university, you might find the AASA reports or something like that because I think in part, because I think we realized that archives are important. We tried to put things in the archives, but I think that so much of what happens and that is essential is the institution building that happens behind the scenes and that doesn't really get put forward in part because it's more fluid.

It's the private conversations between faculty members in between people who have authority at the university. Professor Cheng is really the one pushing that forward. I personally am just incredibly in awe of what she's able to accomplish as well. I hope that this will continue to grow in the coming years.

My understanding is that they haven't hired a new faculty member in the last year or two who focuses on Asian American studies and hopefully the social sciences will start doing that a bit more. I think that Professor Valanzuela has done some great stuff in terms of Latino politics, and hopefully they can have someone who focuses on Asian politics as well one day. That's pretty much what I would say.

FM:

Yeah, I totally agree. I'm in the politics department and Professor Valenzuela was my JP advisor. He's great, but I totally agree. I think the Latino politics aspect and the Asian politics aspect are different. I always felt like, Oh, by the way, then the Asians, blah, blah, blah. It's kind of just like a little side note to all of his lectures

EK:

I think that that's one, which is the more I got involved in Asian American Studies, the more I would notice if I'm reading the news or looking at papers that depending on how much space people wanted to devote when they discussed race, then it's either like white, black; white, black, and Latino; or then white, black, Latino, and Asian. And then the Asian only comes up when people either have a particular thing to say about Asians, or they just happen to have more space if they’re willing to write everything. It's unfortunately something that ends up as kind of a coda at the end often, which is so unfortunate because in so many ways, Asians-- and Latinos as well -- help to really show just how fluid and complex our understandings of race in the United States are.

If you think of it purely through the lens of white and black, it becomes so binary, so rigid that it becomes very hard to deconstruct everything that happens in our society and the way in which it can affect people differently. But once sees the gradients that can happen when you have different ethnic groups, and not even to mention native groups, which I think is also something that Princeton really needs to work on as someone who was just at Stanford, which I think really does quite a good job in terms of promoting Native Studies. Princeton clearly has a massive gap in this respect and hopefully that will grow at some point in the future.

But that helps to really, I think, do what is in many ways, the most important thing, which is to show why race is so artificial and make it so that people can really think in a nuanced way that goes beyond the ingrained notions of white and black that we're told in our stories about like the Civil War or a Jim Crow or something like that and how we can, by breaking that down, we can make some progress in terms of getting rid of all of the negative racist aspects that currently exist in many parts of our society.